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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of Googlers, Applers (?), Amazonians or Netflixers posting on HN but not identifying themselves as such. Likewise some FBers do identify themselves as such. I only see it in technical posts (open hardware, folly, oculus etc) because I find the discussion of social networks being good/bad boring.

But definitely if there were a post about why fb is evil and I worked at fb I probably wouldn’t mention that. You don’t see that many google rms defending google on HN either.

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I'm a Googler, but I don't talk about it on HN, mostly because the Google-related articles are almost entirely negative, and I'm not about to be in the trenches on HN defending my employer. There's plenty of other good articles to read instead. I imagine some FBers probably feel similarly.

Except that the sentiment toward Facebook is considerably more negative than toward Google - at least that's my feeling, but I don't have data to back it up. Is there an opinion poll somewhere about "which one of the FAANG (or however they are called nowadays) companies do you hate the most"?

"Except"? I feel you mean "Especially".

There is, but it's pre-pandemic data and about the general public, not the HN crowd: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...

Wow, that's both much more favorable towards all brands than I would have expected, and definitely in a different order than I would have expected based on the mainstream media stories I consume. Amazon on the top? Apple in the middle? Wow.

Note that the popular press articles about “big tech” are often articles by people who feel threatened by it (traditional journalists) or articles about some politician complaining that some topic they care about is or is not being censored.

I’m not saying journalists are scum by any means, just saying it’s kind of a natural outcome.

Meanwhile most people are looking at dog photos and pictures of their friends’ kids and not worrying about these issues. Or saving money on Amazon even as their downtown hollows out.

Thanks! That confirms my hunch about Facebook and Google, but I didn't expect Amazon to come out at the top (even pre-pandemic, I would have though their treatment of warehouse and delivery workers and their threat to retail shopping would have affected the public opinion more negatively). Also, Apple in the lower half, below Microsoft?! Guess their users are devoted, but also critical? Also, that was the time of the butterfly keyboard debacle, maybe that played a part...

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